AI slop is coming to a legal system near you. Actually, it probably already has.
Lawyers increasingly encounter AI-generated material from clients, counterpart attorneys, self-represented parties, experts, and others.
Some of it is excellent.
Some is slop. Here’s a technical illustration.
Like it or not, your graduates are likely to deal with AI – including AI slop – from now on.
What Should Law Schools Do?
I just posted a short article on SSRN, Beyond AI Slop: Preparing Law Students for Responsible Practice in the AI Era, which argues that law schools should prepare students for three aspects of practice that are becoming increasingly important.
Students need to learn how to:
- Use AI responsibly themselves. This includes understanding its benefits and limitations, protecting confidential and sensitive information, and exercising independent professional judgment.
- Evaluate AI-generated work from other people. Clients, counterpart attorneys, self-represented parties, experts, and others may provide AI-generated material. Lawyers need to know how to identify and verify information that may be unreliable.
- Counsel clients about their own AI use. Clients may consult AI before or during a representation, sometimes without telling their lawyers. Lawyers should help them use it productively, develop realistic expectations, avoid foreseeable problems, and understand possible confidentiality and discovery risks.
These functions require more than just knowing how to write a clever prompt. They require independent legal competence, professional judgment, and risk-based verification procedures – including deciding what needs checking and how carefully.
Need for School-Wide AI Strategies
That raises important questions for law schools.
- What should every graduate know and be able to do?
- Where in the curriculum should students learn and practice those competencies?
- How should schools assess whether students can actually do these things?
- Who is responsible for periodically reconsidering the answers as AI and legal practice change?
The article argues for coordinated, school-wide strategies rather than leaving the whole enterprise to scattered electives, individual faculty policies, or the time-honored educational strategy of hoping that students will figure it out themselves.
Schools do not all need the same strategy, nor do they require every professor to teach AI or use it in every course. Schools have different students, faculties, curricula, resources, and educational goals. But every school should be asking these questions.
Law schools should be part of a much larger public legal health effort. Lawyers, courts, bar organizations, dispute resolution programs, technology companies, educators, and others all have roles to play in helping people get the benefits of AI while reducing foreseeable harms. Law schools have a particularly important role because they can help future lawyers develop good habits before bad habits become deeply embedded in practice.
We’ll talk about this at the WIP on Friday.
In the meantime, consider this modest proposal: How about preparing our students for problems they’re really likely to encounter from their first day on the job?
